


MUSE, DREAM, FIN HEREUSE / A PYGMALION RETELLING

by cheekslikewine



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, Art, Artists, Canon Gay Relationship, Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Genderbending, Inspired by Pygmalion and Galatea (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Modern Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 20:28:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19158397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheekslikewine/pseuds/cheekslikewine
Summary: They idealized it, always, those inbred romantics, but that spoke nothing for the dim suffering that veiled this lifestyle of living on a prayer, pining after a bewitching, drifting light that flickered most days — something they loved with a heart full of youthful iron will, off-chance of becoming great, bright, remembered. They were dirty and unkempt, but their minds were brimming with beautiful, beautiful things, thoughts and dreams silvered with the stuff of hope. They were artists.She smiled. That is all; that is enough.





	MUSE, DREAM, FIN HEREUSE / A PYGMALION RETELLING

**Author's Note:**

> guess which bitch tried out a new tone with this one. me. dunno if it worked but if it did for you, put me with the homies in the mezzanine, please

 

                        I

            The Mezzanine Studio churned. Makeshift bedside desks, flea-bitten mattresses, a long trestle table fixed at the center of the room like the sternum to a rib-cage. Dulcet jazz under white noise. Along the length of the work surface sat avant-gardes, novelists, tragedians, tinkerers, bona fide geniuses. An eclectic, bright, moneyless bunch they were. Naturally so, because the Mezzanine extended its spaces to every poor thing with an idea.

            Pyg sat on a shapeless pallet trying to refine the last strokes of the sheen on Gala’s hair on her lagging software: wide-end brush point, two-thirds transparency, hex code of #AEA8FF (powdered forget-me-nots). Unwashed hair fell into her face. She zoomed out from 568% back to 100%, holding the archaic iPad at arm’s length. Angled curve of the jawbone, tendon in the neck, jut at the base of the fibula, slope of a nose and left shoulder and tipped hip. Pyg squinted.

            She then noticed she wasn’t entirely alone. Across from her sat her bedfellow, Hepha. Hepha had rich beautiful skin, #1D0C00 (syrup brown, dash of black), but not a good face, and was a builder of things. He clapped a pair of weathered, long-fingered hands.

            “How is the gal going?”

            “I can’t get the shading of her cleavage right.” Pyg showed Hepha.

            “Her cleavage looks fine,” Hepha said. “Zoom out. To, like, 25% or something. See, look there. Don’t worry about the cleavage. Look at the slant of her hip. Make her waist wider, coward. People with small waists can’t stand like that. They’ll break in half.”

            “Melodrama.”

            “Dead serious. Pyg, when I put my automaton together like that, it falls on its rear. Make the waist wider. You know what, make the hips wider, too. Good for childbirth.”

            Pyg blew out a breath. She took the measurements—waist and hip girth—and scaled the numbers higher.

            “You’re ingenious, Heph,” she said, flipping the piece around for him to see.

            “So I’m told.” He grinned, and tucked himself into more than his share of their duvet. “You know, Pyg,” he said, “you did her well. Hell, she looks so real she might even come alive when you turn your back.”

            “I hope she does,” Pyg murmured.

            “She looks like a catch, I’ll give you that,” Hepha said.

            Pyg snorted. “It’s more than that, you swine.” She sighed. “Heph, don’t you want to get out of this place?”

            “The Mezzanine? You think it’s that horrible?”

            “No,” she said, looking around the large platform of worktables, sleeping bags, books, wishes. It was home. “But can you stand the wait? Every one of us—we’re poor, we’re luckless, we’re working every day to be noticed. Not even noticed. Just glanced at. Not even glanced at by genuine people who are in the industry for art, but by fake-appreciative elitists who are all rolling in it. Can you stand that?”

            “Sure I can,” Hepha replied, closing his eyes. “We all have to, you know? The Fates don’t serve poor, bright folk like us. They serve the fattest purses. We have to work ten times as hard for even the smallest fraction of the say. Sometimes that doesn’t even happen. And that’s just how it is, Pyg.”

            “That’s horrible,” said Pyg.

            Hepha let out a laugh. “Sure is.”

            “I’ll get out of this. With Gala.”

            “Gala’s a 3D design of a person in your tablet, Pyg,” Hepha sighed. “She’s a great design, web companies would pay a nice little sum for her, but she’s not going to get you somewhere else to stay.”

            “Gala’s more than just a design,” she defended. “She’s more than that. She’s an idea. A promise. She’s priceless.”

            “You used to always say something about promises,” he said. “That they’re illusory.”

            “Hepha.” She swatted at him. “Leave me alone.”

            “We share a bed,” he replied, voice low with fatigue. “Not like you could section yourself off that easy.”

            She blew out a breath in the growing dim, as workers and artists turned off three of the four gooseneck lamps. “Go sleep. Rascal.”

            Outside the tall windowpanes, midnight bled its dark dyestuff into the late sky. The worker bees had retreated to their cots and blow-out mattresses. Across the room gleamed the single other source of illumination in the Mezzanine. The strong lamplight near the end of the trestle cut down in shafts from behind Prome’s hefty shoulder as he moved deft hands over his clay work—which he had recently christened _Dora_. Beside him, Ove scribbled a grand story in his tattered notebook.

            Pyg looked at her work of life and color. She didn’t know what exactly made her so obsessed over this girl. Gala, she had named her, after a special thing of opulence and wealth. Gala, with skin of burnt sienna, #E97451. Gala, with strong shoulders broad and hips even broader. Gala, with feline eyes and a face holding back a secret. Gala, dressed in #FFFEF0 crème-white, #160C8E indigo shoulder-length hair, leaning nonchalantly against something off the frame. Gala—her made-up character, persona, every dip and cant of her frame—was everything Pyg wished the love of her life would look like.

            Pyg tried lightening Gala’s skin. She wrinkled her nose at it, darkened the complexion generously. Better. And what of her hair? Her _cleavage_? Hepha said it was fine, but she kept reckoning it was shaded in too deep—

            Abruptly, Pyg jolted. She blinked at her work. Gods. It must’ve been the screen light making her see things. She felt delirious…with what? With fatigue? Obsession? Desire? A torrid mix of all three, it seemed. Because before she closed off her tablet, she could’ve sworn she saw Gala cock her head at her—some quick-flowing movement, to and fro, there and then gone just as fast.

            Pyg stood, walked over to the charging station at the end of the trestle, and plugged it in. Around her, the quotidian clamor of the Mezzanine ebbed. Engineers, artisans, penmen—the bulk of them had laid down their aspirations for the night and retreated to their respective ramshackle sleeping quarters. Drowsy dreamers they were, reclined, curled up, heads on makeshift pillows that were really just old overcoats wrapped round satchels. In the quiet, remaining toilers stayed up and worked through the night.

            Their whole lives were based off this Mezzanine. Were the building to flood, everything within it to be devastated, that would irrevocably ruin the lives of fifty people. They had nothing but a wish, and sometimes even less. They worked because it meant moving forward, no matter how slowly. They moved forward because as a penniless, drifting artist, that’s how to survive. 

            Some passé jazz song crooned from the soft speaker of a musician across the room. A perfume of sleep had diffused, clouding up the windows. Pyg knew she had to rest.

            Some artists, she knew, spoke to their art as if it had life to breathe life into it. She turned to her side, tucked her palm beneath her cheek, felt the rhythmic rise and fall of Hepha’s back against hers. The bastard snored in his sleep.

            Pyg wondered if this Mezzanine, this breeding ground of vision and artistry, had finally made her a lunatic. Yes. She began to whisper.

            “Gal, Gala, Galatea,” she said. Stupid. She shut her eyes, hoped for everything to happen. “I wish I could have a way out. I wish I could find money with art as easy as I can with law. I wish Hepha, Prome, Deda, Ove, everyone all the best. I wish I can be true. I wish the gods could bring you to life, give me someone like you. Muse. Dream. _Fin hereuse_. Galatea, Gala, Gal.”

            Hope. She had grown up conditioned to be scared to reach for it. Something that was plentiful and glittering, even more so when times were bleak. You wanted to hold on to it because you had nothing else to hold on to. But hope was an illusion, mist with no substance. You learned not build yourself on it, see it as a foothold, because in this world, it promised you nothing. Pyg learned that early.

            Yet she couldn’t shake it. She who had abstained from hope ever since she was young, had found that it was the only thing she had left. Quiet thoughts, beautiful phantoms of her imagination, circled her head all the way to sleep. A dark neck. Bright eyes. A lilting voice. Hope. Drifting, sweet, precarious stuff that got everywhere and never left. She fell asleep swathed in it.

 

                        II

            She woke into an odd haze. Looked around. Everyone was motionless, cocooned in capes and trench coats and sleep. Pyg frowned. The Mezzanine was perpetually alive. Even during ungodly hours, there would always be someone tinkering away at the trestle, stippling a moonlit canvas, pacing beneath the windows muttering an epic poem. Tonight, everybody was quiet, and it disconcerted her. 

            Pyg sat up. In his sleep, Hepha had somehow stolen away the entire duvet. She breathed in—even the air tasted different. It wasn’t soft, slow-flowing, like the Mezzanine always was at night. Instead, it was crackling, charged with anticipation. Pyg, who never could walk away from something unexplained, stood up and began picking her way through the sleeping bodies.

            She made a blind beeline for the trestle, where her iPad was charging at the head. More often than not she woke in the night, restless. More often than not, one or two people would be up working, and she would catch a whiff of the sheer drive in their spinner’s hands, lover’s eyes. More often than not, she would retrieve her Gala from the table and join.

            Tonight, there wasn’t anybody awake. This was new. So she thought she’d try her hand at being one of those nocturnal beacons working away under a lamplight, one that spurred others to get up and come alive too. One of those workers—chipping, weaving, writing, sketching, unfazed by the dusk or the odds.

            Pyg knew she had gotten there when the corner of a table pushed rudely into her hip. She fumbled around for the silicon casing of her iPad and swiped past the lock screen into what was ought to be Gala’s face, still open, staring at her. The way it had been before she last closed it.

            But Gala, her lovely swan, was gone.

            Her screen opened to a blank page. The way things would look if she just started an art piece anew. Her heart jackrabbiting, Pyg backed out of the page and scrolled through the portfolio of every single artwork she had ever made. They were all there. She clicked onto the folder labeled _G_ , opened every single one of the fifty-two drafts she had of this girl that culminated into the maddening, tantalizing Gala.

            Blank. Every single one. As if her little bird had been robbed from its nest.

            She slammed the device hard down on the railing. She felt like tearing into something and eating it alive. Her blood roared, seethed. Anguish, made even hotter by confusion, passed through her roughly, repeatedly. What was this? Months of clench-jawed toil and painstaking perfectionism, the love of her life, stolen from her?

            That was what enraged her. She had nothing to blame, nobody to hurt. It would’ve been so much easier if someone had spirited Gala away—then, she could’ve had something to channel her wrath into, some way of taking back what was hers. But this…the gods were cold culprits. They did not care, and there was nothing she could do to make them care. This was their last laugh. They had ruined her life and left her with no means of fulfilling vengeance.

            Pyg felt an abrupt stroke of vertigo pass through her. She clutched the handrailing, breathing labored, shot through with fury and misery. Gods. Gods. Gods. She wanted to scream. It was funny, thinking that all these artisans and workers, who had all retired to bed for once in a blue moon, would have to wake up to a livid girl shrieking, bent over with grief.

            Mourning. She was mourning. It was as if a square of light—an exit—that had been slowly advancing all this time had been snuffed out entirely within a split second. The rope ladder cut, the trapdoor sealed. The hope drained from her. She had nothing. She was nothing. How could she have fallen under the illusion that Gala, a figment of a girl, could’ve given her substance? Muse, dream, _fin hereuse_. Gone, gone, gone.

            Pyg closed her tablet, laid it down on the table. Let out a dead laugh. Cried silently into the dark.

            Then a hand fell upon hers.

            She, too crushed to register immediately, had only looked when the hand closed softly around her wrist. Pyg whipped her head up, flipped on the gooseneck lamp with her free hand. She blinked, astonished. Almost lost her wits. And her footing.

            Her. _Her_.

            Gala stood there, glazed in hot amber light.

            Pyg blinked, blinked again, took skin between index and thumb and pinched. Pain lanced through her forearm, gone as fast as it came. Gala’s hand had slipped from her wrist, but Pyg scrabbled to touch her, that hand of hers, warmth and fine bones. Here she was, no longer pixels of a cracked screen, but real, larger than life. #E97451 doe-fur skin, #160C8E indigo hair edged with #AEA8FF powdered forget-me-nots. #FFFEF0 milked-crème gown. Wide hips. Cat eyes. Hip against the table’s edge. Her _cleavage_. Pyg couldn’t suppress a laugh of wonder. 

            “You,” she managed. “You’re real.” Pyg felt intoxicated just looking at her—it was like drinking in the sweet of some heavy, heady brew. In flesh and in blood, she was here.

            Gala smiled, all cheek, just like how Pyg had drawn her. “Two years, it took for you to make me. I waited, Pygmalion.”

            Pyg floundered, struck dumb. Her creation was speaking to her. “For what?”

            She laughed, and it was glorious. “To save your despondent ass. What the hell else?” Vulgarity flowed from the girl’s mouth like a flux of honey.

            Pyg stared at her. “How?”

            “Oh, but I already did,” Gala sung in a whisper. The drapes of her dress were like folded wings. “Art has saved everyone in this room. It has saved you, Pyg, and it will keep saving you, even if you don’t often notice. She’s a quiet heroine.” She saw Pyg staring at her, unresponsive, and raised a brow. “Hm?”

            Pyg started. “No. No. I just love the way you speak.”

            Gala cocked her hip, smiling. “I will be here for a long time,” she said. “You will have all eternity to love the way I speak.”

_Muse, dream,_ fin hereuse _. I made this girl. I love this girl. I have this girl._

            All else was white noise.

            Gala moved with the dreamy, languid grace of a swan through water. Thighs, calves, flat bare feet. Pyg watched her the entire way, froze when Gala leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

_Gods._ Pyg sighed. Tried to think thoughts. Couldn’t. Her mind was somewhere in a sun-warmed dream, woolgathering.

            Gala whispered something into her ear. _My bride_ , it felt like.


End file.
